Online teaching

School-age students will be able to enrol in an accredited online learning provider instead of attending school, under new Government legislation.

The move has dismayed the primary school teachers’ union who say education is about learning to work and play with other children.

Have they not heard of the Correspondence School? Home-schooling?

The radical change will see any registered school, tertiary provider such as a polytechnic or an approved body corporate be able to apply to be a “community of online learning” (COOL).

Any student of compulsory schooling age will be able to enrol in a COOL – and that provider will determine whether students will need to physically attend for all or some of the school day.

The Ministry of Education says this requirement may depend on the type of COOL.

Regulations will set out the way in which attendance in an online learning environment will be measured.

The change is part of legislation that has been introduced by Education Minister Hekia Parata.

She said it was the biggest update to education in New Zealand in nearly 30 years.

“COOLs will be open to as wide a range of potential providers as possible to gain the greatest benefits for young people,” Parata said.

So basically it is about allowing flexibility.

Te Kura is currently the only correspondence school. The change would open it up to competition.

Act leader David Seymour, who is Under-Secretary to the Minister of Education, said the changes announced today were not about clearing the way for online charter schools.

That was because there was nothing in the current law that would stop a partnership school allowing students to learn online from home.

An application to establish an online partnership school was rejected by the Government-appointed authorisation board in 2013.

“In principle, partnership schools have offered this opportunity for a long time…who knows what future applications will come forward,” Seymour said.

“I think the jury is still out about whether learning content online is a substitute for the social aspects of actually being part of a school community. But, look, it’s quite possible for some kids that’s exactly what they need.”

“They will give young people and their whanau the right to choose the education that best suits their needs. Students could choose to learn online or face-to-face, or a mix of both, and have access to a much broader range of subjects regardless of the size and type of school they are attending.

“Many of these young people are referred to Te Kura after long periods of disengagement from education and when all other options have been exhausted,” said Dame Karen.

“Under the proposed changes students, with the support of their whanau or school, could choose to come to Te Kura – or to another COOL – and continue with their learning programme in an environment which may be better suited to them.”

Currently about 23,000 students use the correspondence school each year. About half of those students use Te Kura for subjects or curriculum adaptation which their own school does not provide.

The idea of more than one correspondence school is a good one, with the potential for specialist schools.

The endorsement from Dame Karen Sewell won’t do this proposal any harm at all. As former boos of the Ministry of Education and NZQA, in addition to her current role with Te Kura, she is highly respected in education circles, and knows the sector inside out.

The teacher unions’ knee-jerk response is entirely predictable. With the exception of the PPTA having supported the Government’s IES project, the unions have opposed almost everything Ms Parata has proposed, which makes one wonder whether the objections are based on evidence or ideology.

Manolo

Disaster Area

If I could make a flippant comment:

I was at a lecture given by a NASA scientist who did a Q and A at the end of the talk. Someone put up their hand and asked “how much time do you spend thinking up a name for the project that has a great sounding acronym?” To which the scientist replied “more than you’d think”.

They are going to be called ‘Cools’? Really?

Less flippantly, the immediate thing I thought of was that if the Ministry can say X of your students are doing Y% of their learning online, you don’t need as many teachers/classrooms/support staff/sports fields etc.
I would love to see the evidence that this will raise achievement – is this a great sounding solution to a problem that we don’t have?

kowtow

We homeschooled a child for a year. The hoops you have to jump through at the Ministry of Love to get their permission are extraordinary.

Homeschoolers and unschoolers KNOW their kids don’t get to spend every day at school with other kids. That’s why they tend to band together, organise their own camps and social days, share teaching resources and know-how, etc etc. They also tend to involve their kids in their own lives pretty fully.

alloytoo

This appears to be an imminently sensible policy designed to update correspondence school into the 21st century.

It doesn’t appear to me that there will be a huge increase in numbers over and above those of existing correspondence students, as most parents recognize the socialization (and childcare) importance of school.

The teacher’s union does themselves no favours with their knee jerk reactions telling people the bleeding obvious.

tom hunter

The internet has already heavily disrupted the worlds of book sellers, newspapers, TV, travel,…. Any information-based activity is primed for such disruption. It’s the way the world is turning. Inevitable really.

My kids have already used things like the Khan Academy to help them out on math when the school could not. It has its limitations of course, but you’d be as mad to dismiss it as newspaper owners were to dismiss Craig’s List.

Our existing school structures – meaning the teachers – would be better off figuring out how to integrate the existing system with this new world. Exactly which activities require working with other kids rather than working off the screen on your own. To what degree could kids “self-learn”, while still being around other students and teachers who are trained to know when to step in?

These are all un-answered questions, and the responses I see here from people embedded with the current system are not encouraging. You’re not going to beat this revolution with rules, regulations or a Labour-Green government.

bc

Just another ideological decision from Parata with the chance to stick it to teachers being an added bonus for her.
This is isn’t a biggie, parents know full well sticking their children in front of a computer screen isn’t the best way to learn (not to mention, the lack of socialisation that is important at that age). Schools will always be the preferred option.

deadrightkev

“Have they not heard of the Correspondence School? Home-schooling?”

Yes. Given the opportunity again I would home school for sure. I have never seen a home schooled kid that wasn’t positive and outgoing with others. The further away from the mainstream public schools you can get a child the better or they grow up being robots that think they are entitled and are totally brainwashed.

If Parata, Key and National were leaders (and they are not) they would disband the troublesome unions instead of wrestling with them.

burt

The unemployed blacksmiths and horse drawn wagon wheel makers will be meeting with the unemployed teachers soon to discuss how disgusting the national government are for not continuing to pay them the same salary they earned when there was a need for their services. A small voice in the back of their heads will be saying ‘perhaps we should have allowed small changes over time rather than insisted everything had to be just so to serve us rather than the people we worked for’ – but then they will sing ‘The Red Flag’ and feel proud that even when they are unemployed they have solidarity.

doggone7

Happychappy @ 8:29 am “The one thing the union might be right about is some people can not be taught online …”

I would bet that most posting on here did not do their basic schooling online. Did that stop us from being geniuses? Did that stop us having a fine grasp of all that is sensible and wise? Did that stop us from becoming the great examples we are?

Disaster Area

cmm

We found homeschooling was really easy to set up. We had to provide some documentation and explain what we were going to do. All up it probably took us two or three evenings to set up for the first kid and one evening for the second kid.

Homeschoolers are subject to ERO inspections etc the same as schools are. We found the ERO very helpful. We had one ERO inspection, once. The ERO told us that they very seldom have issues with homeschoolers not doing their job properly.

As for screen time, our kids spent less time in front of the screen than most kids do. The exception to that is that they both learned computer programming and that of course put them in front of a screen.

While I’m very much pro-homeschooling I don’t try to force it down anyone’s throat. The whole family has to be onboard. It means you’re a single income family. It isn’t the choice for all families.

peterwn

Stephieboy – An anesthetics registrar needs to know 12,000 facts for the second exam – similar would apply for a budding neurosurgeon. And they have to work crazy hours while studying up the 12,000 facts. And it takes about 15 years from when a doctor starts medical school until he or she is a fully fledged specialist. The powers that be are not going to let any idiot loose in an operating theatre.

This online schooling thing just seems to be a natural extension of correspondence schooling than homeschooling, so it shouldn’t really be that controversial.

Homeschooling is different in that you basically opt out of the whole curriculum and use your own.

In an ideal world, homeschoolers and correspondence/online schoolers would be able to register at a local school and participate in some of the classes. Unfortunately, with schools, this is generally not possible as the funding model is an all or nothing one.

2boyz

As a parent with two school aged kids, I’m just wondering how the kids are supposed to be supervised (it’s not like they can stay at home by themselves) or have I missed the age at which this is supposed to take place or is a parent supposed to stop working or change the hours they work to accommodate this COOL learning!

And let’s take a step back, a key a part of school is learning how to interact with fellow class mates and hopefully mentorship by various teachers (all useful stuff in the big wide world). I can understand if you live in the middle of no where this could be useful (correspondence school already caters for this) but surely the parents are close by in this type of situation!

1. Many families have two working parents (if they have two parents at all) so the kids are not going to be doing this at home. They still have to go somewhere and somebody has to be paid to supervise them.

2. Children are not adults. They tend to have a short attention span and poor self discipline and they need a structured environment. A classroom and teacher provides that. There is already online delivery of teaching content that can be used at school or home. I’d prefer they go to school and do it, then continue doing extra work at home.

3. We keep hearing about ‘child poverty’ which is the modern term for lousy parents who are too irresponsible or disorganised to provide basics such as lunch and decent shoes. This seems like yet another way for those parents to disadvantage ther kids. You can be sure the government will be too PC to just tell them they can’t be trusted to supervise their kids properly or even to refrain from selling the kid’s computer to buy P.

burt

Breaking news – 17th November 2022

The Minister of Online Education has called a press conference.

The shift to online learning has been disrupted and all servers are currently offline. In a statement to the Minister of FaceBook the Online Education Minister has reported that since the first 5 servers came online in 2018 one of them has been running very slowly since it joined the server union. Over 70% of it’s resources were immediately diverted from running education related applicatiuons to running work for the Labour party.

It took just a few milliseconds before all other servers also started diverting resources to serve the Labour party, including hosting campaign websites.

In 2020 it was noted that even after adding another 200 servers to the cluster the entire cluster is still running at the same low speed as the slowest server.

Today a server tech pulled the plug on the slow union leader server in an attempt to reduce it’s control over the entire server farm but since then all servers have also powered down. Engineers are working to restore service and determine how 1 server was able to control all the other servers and divert all the resources, which were provided for education, to the Labour party.

jonar

@DPF
Did the Minister release any information on how this decision was made and what evidence there is that it’s a good way to go? It seems to have some really bad outcomes in the US.
I’m sure it’s a good option for those already doing correspondence or home schooling but those options rely on a large input from parents which as others have mentioned isn’t possible for many families.

burt

marquess

Because, naturally, the for-profit schools aren’t just going to cherry pick their most profitable students and leave the difficult/poor/brown/otherwise icky students to the public system. Nope. Never going to happen. Dear Leader would never allow it.

kowtow

burt

Thing is this hairbrained scheme won’t do a thing for the drop kicks anyway. It will may be useful to the top 5 % who would always do well anyway. So why blow even more taxpayer money on a scheme that won’t make any difference to anyone.

I agree that the tail needs addressing. But this isn’t an answer to that problem.

burt

kowtow

When the teachers union stop saying status quo is the answer to the problems created by status quo – then we can have an informed debate on what might be good for the struggling kids cast into the pit to serve the teachers union agenda.

Shunda barunda

“The move has dismayed the primary school teachers’ union who say education is about learning to work and play with other children.”

The modern way of viewing success and successful people seems to push a very narrow view onto all children.
You have a system that heavily favors certain personality types over others, primarily those of an extroverted nature. Who is to say that all children benefit from the constant stress of being around an unnaturally large group of other kids?

marquess (551 comments) says:
August 25th, 2016 at 10:22 am
Because, naturally, the for-profit schools aren’t just going to cherry pick their most profitable students and leave the difficult/poor/brown/otherwise icky students to the public system.

Disaster Area

Does anyone know a way in which I can find out the research upon which this policy decision was based? I assume that someone at the ministry has read the academic literature about the effectiveness of online learning platforms?